Heidegger On Truth And Myth PDF Download

Immediately after his publication of Sein und Zeit (1927), Heidegger began to reframe his approach to the question of being. By his own admission, a principal problem with Sein und Zeit is that it describes the disclosure of Dasein but fails to describe how being discloses itself to Dasein. A recurring observation in Heidegger's later thought is that, since Plato's introduction of the forms and Aristotle's structuring of logic, philosophy has obscured the fundamental question of being (Grundfrage), substituting instead what he calls "the guiding question [Leitfrage]," namely, the inquiry into the "being of beings." In order to free himself from this alleged obscurity, Heidegger begins an investigation of the Presocratics, and a pivotal moment in this investigation is his lecture course of 1942-43, Parmenides, on the mythical proem of Parmenides's poem. Many scholars have explored Heidegger's writings on truth in article-length works; a few, including Bambach and Caputo, have published longer works placing Parmenides in a developmental context, but even these do not make the lecture course their primary focus, and their assessments do not always take Heidegger's ideas seriously on their own terms. Therefore this dissertation, the first book-length investigation of Parmenides in English, examines the significance of the work in the development of Heidegger's concept of truth and seriously engages his concepts of being, truth, and myth to determine the value of his claims in Parmenides. I will begin by discussing Heidegger's explorations of truth in the period prior to Parmenides and considering his interpretations, in texts other than Parmenides, of three Presocratic thinkers: Anaximander, Heraclitus, and Parmenides himself. Then I will examine a specific claim in Parmenides, namely, that myth is a mode of speech that discloses truth without regard for logical correctness. Finally, I will examine other prominent interpretations of Heidegger's thought and, in response, suggest a new approach. While it is true that Heidegger's conclusions can be dangerous, risking the severing of human concern from inquiry, it is also true that to reject Heidegger's thought outright is to slip back into the prevailing claims and systems which he has shown are inadequate.